Sounds like Boards of Canada. In the early years of this century, you heard many electronic music aficionados using that phrase, usually in the context of an endorsement. The Scottish brothers Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin didn’t invent a new sound, but they did take various strands of music floating around and pull them into one place and essentially perfect them. And their particular fusion was so distinctive that their name became shorthand. The appetite for the BoC was so voracious that the group’s actual output, which was actually fairly prolific in its first decade, wasn’t nearly enough to satisfy it. But that was a long time ago. Since 2006 we’ve heard a lot of music that seems spiritually connected to Boards of Canada, from Burial to chillwave, but we haven’t heard a note of music from the originators until the surprise announcement of Tomorrow’s Harvest.
While BoC have always seemed comfortable inside their core sound, their records are still easy to distinguish. On Music Has the Right to Children, they mixed creepy pre-erased drones with childhood nostalgia and drums that drew from hip-hop; on 2002’s Geogaddi, the beats got harder and the unease grew more intense, resulting in an album that was still playful but far darker. Campfire Headphase, from 2005, brought acoustic guitars to the table and aimed for a more pastoral feel, but it lacked the tension of what came before. And Tomorrow’s Harvest is in some ways the flipside to Campfire, the bucolic tint swapped out for moody drones and encroaching dread. It is the most internally focused of Boards of Canada’s records. Rather than working around the edges of their sound in search of new territory, Tomorrow’s Harvest finds them drawing back toward the center.
Given its hermetic feel, it makes sense BoC have indicated that soundtracks were an especially big influence. They specifically invoke the work of John Carpenter, Mark Isham, and Wendy Carlos, all of whom constructed some of their most enduring scores in the late 1970s and early 80s. That was a period where analog synthesis was reaching full maturity but digital synthesis was in its earlier stages, when the tape-driven Mellotron competed for studio space with the digital Fairlight and new timbres were being explored. If the earliest Boards of Canada music still seemed inspired by Warp’s post-techno Artificial Intelligence movement, beats on Tomorrow's Harvest are secondary. The tempos are generally slow, and there’s not much trickiness to the percussion. The tracks tend to create a groove and stick with it for the duration.
The creative energy here is directed toward building textures, which are very deep and rich indeed. The most visceral sound design in Boards of Canada’s music has tended to occur during their short interludes, but here they’ve taken some those ideas and explored them at length, filling the tracks with details that can take some time to soak in. On headphones, you can explore the tracks one motif at a time, as if each were a small landscape. “Jacquard Causeway” has a series of metallic-sounding twinkles that seems to grow out of the chords that swell underneath, and they slip in and out of phase with the underlying drums in a manner that imparts an extra measure of uneasiness. “Split Your Infinities” has bird sounds and distant noises that sound like lasers, both of which are so subtle so as to function subliminally. “Nothing Is Real” is a swirl of deep bass, stop-start drums, and a continual surging synth line that sounds like a swarm of bugs, but it also has a distant, echoing keyboard line that haunts the track like a ghost. The layering of the various sounds on a given track offers a different way in each time, so they can take on an M.C. Escher-like quality, where the tone and emotional content varies according to what you choose to pay attention to. There are sounds behind sounds and sounds underneath sounds and you can find yourself sifting through the layers, turning the pieces inside-out.
If Boards of Canada’s sound construction has reached a new plateau, they do seem to have left some appealing elements of their earlier approach behind. Returning again to Music or Geogaddi, it’s striking how tuneful those records were. Whether they’ve lost that ability or no longer choose to incorporate it, melody is not the focus on Tomorrow’s Harvest. These tracks unfurl, grow, and shrink, but they don’t exactly develop, at least not in the same way. The early playfulness, too, is no longer part of the equation. It’s easy to forget about “childlike” for Boards of Canada at one point didn’t just mean the ache of nostalgia or the fear of nightmares but actually pleasurable activities like clapping hands and laughing and saying funny words. And the lightness and humor-- the repetition of the word “Orange” in "Aquarius", say-- are something they don’t seem remotely interested in here. It’s not hard to imagine a certain kind of Boards of Canada fan missing that variety.
So that’s what is not here. What we’re left with is Boards of Canada’s moodiest record, a full-length tinted with atmosphere that unfolds slowly and is happy to allow you to come to it. Creating a new way to hear electronic music, as they did in the first half of their career, earned them that right to make a record that is absorbed through osmosis. And true to its patient nature and long gestation period, Tomorrow’s Harvest’s last third is its best. As they move from the ultra-simple, Music for Films-like “Sundown” through the soot-dusted “New Seeds”, with its quiet guitar grind and bell-like percussion, and then on through the arpeggiated Tangerine Dream-style “Come to Dust” and the the closing bass-pedals of “Semena Mertvykh”, it’s clear that they still, after all this time and all the imitators, own this world. And it’s nice to hear that they’re still inhabiting it.
